Album Artist easy searching

[Delaquater]

I have Audirvana already running on MacOS Catalina. I can show by album artist, but cannot seem to easily go through the list except by scrolling, which is a pain, and every time you jump into an artist, then jump back out, it resets to the top, which is an utter, utter pain.

So I was looking to see if Origin improved on this. I installed the Trial, but only “Artist” seems to be the way to show it. When I select this, I see much more than Album Artist. It in fact seems to list by Composer. I have roughly 300 album artists, but end up with 750 odd “artists”!

If I go by album, I can choose “Album Artist”, but then the problem is it shows all the albums, whereas I just want one tile for the artist. One thing good is it at least does not seem to reset to the top if I jump into an album here then jump back out.

This is what I ideally want the UI to behave like:
Show by Album Artist. If I select an artist, then go back up, it returns to where I was. Be able to type the first couple of characters, then jump to that in the list, instead of scrolling right down. For instance, if I type “S”, goes to the start of the album artists that start with S. Or if I type “ST”, then it goes to the album artists starting with ST, like Stereolab.

This is really important to me, because otherwise, the program doesn’t add any value to how I want to easily look at a glance through my collection, and then I find it more satisfying to look through my CDs. Scrolling through everything is tedious and painful. I don’t find it enjoyable and it just puts me off looking through my digital collection.

At this point, I don’t find Origin adds anything of real value to me over the Audirvana I have, so I won’t be purchasing it. Unless I missed something in what I described above, which if so, can somebody enlighten me?

[TribecaMikey]

I’m using Origin on Mac Monterey 12.4, and I believe I get the behavior you’re looking for. Here is the view for Albums by Artist.

If I click on Charlie Byrd I see this:

If I use the back arrow I go back to Album by Artist view and I still see Charlie Byrd in the album list.

If I’m in Album by Artist view and I type Charlie Byrd in the search box I get this:

If I click on See All I get this:

If I click on the back arrow I go back to the search results.

If I click on the Home button next to an album I get the details of the album.

If I click on the back arrow I go back to the Album view.

In short, back arrow takes me to where I was without losing context. I like this navigation.

[Delaquater]

Thanks @TribecaMikey , I see what you mean, but it doesn’t quite hit the behaviour I want.

Search is great if I want to pop out to a specific artist, or a very small group of artist with a common portion of name, but what I actually want is to very rapidly go to a spot in the entire artist list.

For instance, Apple Music App (used to be iTunes), if you go to the artist list, I press “F”, and it immediately goes to the list starting with F, then if I press “S”, zips down to the artists starting with S. That’s what I want, a really rapid way to navigate through the whole list to zip to specific alphabetic spots, not just search for an artist. In other words, I want to browse it a bit like looking at a shelf of titles.

And it also doesn’t help me that much because I really want to have this list showing by Album Artist, which the original Audirvana does, but Origin doesn’t seem to do.

[reddog1]

That is what happens when I search. Hit ‘F’ artist starting F appear, hit ‘S’ artists starting S appear, pretty standard search, and instant.

[Delaquater]

If I use the Search box, then I type in “S”, it shows a limited list of like 5, then you have to press the “Show All”, and when you do that, it shows anything with the letter S in it. Am I missing something here? I want to press a key, and it jumps down to that alphabetical part of the entire list.

Like Apple Music App in Mac OS can do this, but I’m not particularly interested in Apple’s software for this purpose. I can quickly type “LU”, and it will jump to the first artist in the list starting with LU, and then I can continue scrolling down from there.

As far as I can tell, Audirvana can’t do this. And so far from what I can work out, Audirvana Origin is worse for me than the original Audirvana, because it can’t properly show album artists.

[reddog1]

My apologies, you are correct… I hadn’t looked further than those five.
It’s not great, even though I rarely search that way, it would be nice if it worked the way you describe.

[Delaquater]

I’m happy with the sound quality, it renders the output every well. If some of those UI navigation aspects could be improved, it would help. I might hold for the time being. I like a lot of it, but just some of the UI aspects like this for me get very annoying.

[philipjohnson]

Hi @Delaquater

I’ve always said that the search function in any program would be better served if the “searcher” had access to the criteria.

Although, with AUDIRVĀNA I’m (almost) entirely using album play. It’s only when I’m pruning my metadata and I want to find erroneous edits and correct them. It’s all I bit fidly, I know, and I only do this on a wet, bored day when reading Tolstoy is too much.

Audirvana… sounds very good to me regardless.

Regards

Phil

[reddog1]

I prune my metadata, if needed, external to Audirvana, therefore navigating to the artist or album is easy using finder ( Mac ).